HqMame Update ?

[Fraenk]

Dear Zenju,

1st: Thank You for this awesome project! From time to time I'm playing my favourite games with HqMame at 3xBRZ. And it looks sooo fantastic :-)))

2nd: HqMame is my favourite emulator, because it's so simple. Just drop some ROMs into the rom-folder and start playing - I love it! No crazy menus, just start the emulator, select a game and play :-)))

3rd: Okay, to be fair... Because there are no crazy menus my start-parameters went crazy the last days:

D:\GAMES\MAME\HqMAME_2.31_mame0170_Win32\HqMame.exe -screen0 \\.\DISPLAY2 -window -nokeepaspect -video ddraw -scaler 3xbrz -volume -9 -autosave -uifont asdf -ctrlr default -rompath roms;bios

4th: The "window" and "nokeepaspect" parameters are importand, because after some research I can now cycle through 3 resolutions in windowed-borderless mode with one hotkey/one button-press: 16:9 -> 4:3 -> 3:4. If someone is interested, this is my "Auto Hotkey v1" script that works with HqMame 2.31 on a 2-monitor setup at 1920x1080px:

^!f::wide()

wide(){

WinGetTitle, currentWindow, A
IfWinExist %currentWindow%
{
    WinGetPos, X,,W,, A
    WinSet, Style, -0xC00000 ; title bar
    WinSet, Style, -0x40000 ; thickframe/sizebox
    if (X < 0) ; Display1 - Left - TV screen
    {
        if ((W > 1450) && (W < 1920)) || ((W > 800) && (W < 820))
        {
            WinMove, , , -1920, 0, 1920, 1080 ; 16:9
        }
        else if (W > 1910)
        {
            WinMove, , , -1680, 0, 1440, 1080 ; 4:3
        }
        else if (W > 1430) && (W < 1450)
        {
            WinMove, , , -1365, 0, 810, 1080 ; 3:4
        }
    }
    else ; Display2 - Center - PC Main-Screen
    {
        if ((W > 1450) && (W < 1920)) || ((W > 800) && (W < 820))
        {
            WinMove, , , 0, 0, 1920, 1080 ; 16:9
        }
        else if (W > 1910)
        {
            WinMove, , , 240, 0, 1440, 1080 ; 4:3
        }
        else if (W > 1430) && (W < 1450)
        {
            WinMove, , , 555, 0, 810, 1080 ; 3:4
        }
    }
}

}

return

5th and final: With all this improvements my willingness to play has been revived. So I was looking for some more games. But I had to notice, that a few games just don't work on current HqMame v2.31_mame0170

Some games give errors. When google this erros you see that they are fixed in further Mame-Versions.

HqMame 2.31_mame0170 is from Feb 2016.
Latest Mame 272 is one day old and from Dec 2024.

Could you please please please update your HqMame to latest Mame and latest xBRZ :-)))

Thank you very much in advance!

Kind regards
Frank

[Zenju]

HqMame is pretty dead(1) at this point. It is based on the last Mame version that supported the GDI graphics renderer, which was very unfortunately dropped by Mame. In order to update to a newer version, one of the other renderers like Direct3D would have to integrate xBRZ. Last time I looked this seemed like a horrendously complex and tedious endeavour.

1) It's not really dead, but working fine as ever with all the games I cared about at the time :>